Ghislaine Maxwell is “making it known” that she feels “no remorse” for her role in the sex trafficking operation that landed her in prison, according to her former prisonmate and ex-Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Jen Shah.
During an interview with People, Shah said that she “had limited interactions” with the sex trafficker, who was transferred to the more comfortable, lower-security federal prison camp in Texas over the summer to finish out the rest of her 20-year sentence.
It was there that Maxwell overlapped with Shah, who served just over two years for a telemarketing scheme before her release in December. “Her experience there is very different from anyone else’s—she is treated very differently there,” Shah told the site.
Shah was a cast member on the first three seasons of Salt Lake City’s Real Housewives before her arrest in 2021.
“I worked at recreation,” while serving time, she said, and Maxwell “would come over and talk to us, or I would see her if she would come by recreation, but, honestly, I chose to have very limited interaction with her,” she explained. The reality TV star said she found Maxwell’s attitude off-putting. “She made it very publicly known,” to Shah and their fellow high-profile inmate Elizabeth Holmes, that “There’s no remorse there,” Shah added.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Maxwell’s attorney and FPC Bryan for comment.
Holmes and Shah bonded in the facility while Holmes was serving her 11-year sentence for defrauding investors. Shah revealed that she and Holmes bonded over being assigned “poop duty” together.
“I obviously don’t know all the details of the case or whatever, but I mean, we know enough,” Shah said of Maxwell. “It was a lot when the victims would be on TV and talking, she was just—complete disregard for them, you know, and this is when they are pouring their hearts out in front of Congress, and for these files to be released and stuff.”
“And so to see that kind of behavior when there are real victims that you’re seeing and what they’ve gone through and to be so dismissive of that, that just didn’t sit with me the right way.”
Maxwell began the first three years of her sentence in a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, until her July conversation with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche about her connections to Epstein. After that, Maxwell was moved to the minimum security facility, despite the Bureau of Prisons’ policy banning sex offenders from such facilities. A source told Daily Mail at the time Maxwell’s life was in danger after she spoke to the government, which prompted the move. “There were very real and very credible threats on her life,” they said.
Shah told People on Wednesday that even though the prison is less severe than a federal prison, it still felt like a very real lockdown during her two years there. “You hear all these things, where, ‘Oh, it’s a camp, it’s a federal camp, ‘It’s Camp Cupcake.’ It’s not. It’s prison.”
She added, “Seeing it for the first time, when I walked in there, it took my breath away. And I just thought, ‘This cannot be where I’m gonna be. Like, this is where I’m gonna be every day.’”
